"In a minute," she said half-strangled.
"Don't hurry yourself, my dear," the cooing answer came back. "You know I'll wait all morning for you, if necessary. To wait outside your door for you to come out is the pleasantest thing I know of. There is only one thing pleasanter, and that would be-"
The door sliced back and he found himself confronted by Durand, feet unshod, hair awry, and in nothing but trousers and undershirt.
To make it worse, his face had been bearing down close against the door, to make himself the better heard. He found his nose almost pressed into Durand's coarse-spun barley-colored underwear, at about the height of Durand's chest.
His head went up a notch at a time, like something worked on a pulley, until it was level with Durand's own. And for each notch he had a strangulated exclamation, like a winded grunt. Followed by a convulsive swallowing. "Unh--? Anh--? Unh--?"
"Well, sir ?" Durand rapped out.
Worth's hand executed helpless curlycues, little corkscrew waves, trying to point behind Durand but unable to do so.
"You're--in there? You're--not dressed?"
"Will you kindly mind your business, sir?" Durand said sternly.
The colonel raised both arms now overhead, fists clenched, in some sort of approaching denunciation. Then they faltered, froze that way, finally crumbled. His eyes were suddenly fixed on Durand's right shoulder. They dilated until they threatened to pop from his head.
Durand could feel her arm glide caressingly downward over his shoulder, and then her hand tipped up to fondle his chin, while she herself remained out of sight behind him. He looked down to where Worth was staring at it, and it was the one with the wedding band, their old wedding band, on it.
It rose, was stroking and petting Durand's cheek now, letting the puffy gold circlet flash and wink conspicuously. It gave the slack of his cheek a fond little pinch, then spread the two fingers that had just executed it wide apart, in what might have been construed as a jaunty salute.
"I--I--I didn't know!" Worth managed to gasp out asthmatically, as if with his last breath.
"You do now, sir!" Durand said severely. "And what brings you to my wife's door, may I ask?"
The colonel was backing away along the passage now, brushing the wall now at this side, now at that, but incapable apparently of turning around once and for all and tearing his eyes off the hypnotic spectacle of Durand and the affectionate straying hand.
"I--I beg your pardon!" he succeeded in panting at last, from a safe distance.
"I beg yours!" Durand rejoined with grim inflexibility.
The colonel turned at last and fled, or rather wallowed drunkenly, away.
The detached hand suddenly went up in air, bent its fingers inward, and flipped them once or twice.
"Ta ta," her voice called out gaily, "lovey mine!"
40
Arms close-knit about one another's waists, leaning almost avidly from the open window of her room, shimmering in unison with laughter, they watched the streaming debacle of the colonel's luggage, poured forth from under the veranda shed, followed by its owner's hurried, trotting departure. The colonel could not seem to climb into his waiting coach quickly enough and be gone from this scene of ego-shrivelling discomfiture with enough haste; he all but hopped in on one leg, like an ungainly crane in waddling earthbound flight, and the whole buggy rocked with his plunge.
It was not his own private conscience that spurred him on, conjecturably, it was public ridicule. The story had obviously spread like wildfire about the establishment, in the inexplicable way of such things at seashore resorts, though neither Durand nor she had breathed a word to living soul. It was as though the tale were water and the hotel a sponge; it was as though the keyholes themselves had found tongues for their perpendicular slitted mouths and whispered it. Strollers entering or leaving, at this moment, as he was going, stopped and turned to stare at the spectacle he made in flight, with either outright smiles visible upon their faces, or tactfully sheltering hands to mouths, which betrayed the fact that there were smiles beneath them to conceal.
The colonel fled, within a sheltering turret of his own massed luggage piled high on the seat, the plumage of his male pride as badly frizzled as feathers in a flame. The yellow wheel spokes sluiced into solidified disks, a spurt of dust haze arose, the roadway was empty, the colonel was gone.
She had even wanted to wave, this time with her handkerchief, as she had waved at the door an hour or so before, but Durand, some remnants of masculine fellow-feeling stirring in him, held her hand back, quenched the gesture, though laughing all the same. They turned from the window, still chuckling, arms still tight about one another in new-found possession. They had been cruel just now, though they hadn't intended it, their only thought had been their own amusement. Yet what is cruelty but the giving of pain in the taking of pleasure?
"Oh, dear !" she exhaled, breathless. She parted from him, drooped exhausted over the back of a chair. "That man. He wasn't cut out to be a romantic lover. Yet always that is the type that tries hardest to play the role. I wonder why?"
"Am I?" he asked her, curious to hear what she would say.
She turned her eyes toward him, lidded them inexpressibly. "Oh, Louis," she said in bated whisper. "Can you ask me that? You're the perfect example. With the blushes of a boy--look at you now. The arms of a tiger. And a heart as easily broken as a woman's."
The tiger part was the only one that appealed to him; he decided the other two were wholly her own imaginings.
He exercised them once again, briefly but heartily, as any man would after such prompting.
"We'll have to go soon ourselves," he reminded her presently.
"Why ?" she asked, as if willing enough but failing quite to understand the need to do so.
Then thinking she had found the answer for herself, gave it to him without waiting. "Oh, because of what's happened. Yes, it's true; I was seen with him constantly all these past--"
"No," he said, "that isn't what I meant. It's that--business on the boat. I told you last night, I went to a private investigator in St. Louis, and so far as I know he's still engaged upon it."
"There's no warrant out, is there?"
"No, but I think it's better for us to stay out of his way. I'd rather not have him accost us, or even learn where we are to be found."
"He has no police power, has he?" she asked with quick, brittle interest.
"Not so far as I know. I don't know what he can do or can't do, and I've no wish to find out. The police in New Orleans told me you were immune, but that was at that time, before he took hand in it. Your immunity may expire from one minute to the next, when least we expect it, while he's still around and about. It's safer for us not to place ourselves too close at hand, under their thumbs. Don't you see, we can't go back to New Orleans now."
"No," she agreed without emotion, "we can't."
"And it's better for us not to linger here too long either. Word travels quickly. You cannot help drawing the admiration of all eyes wherever you appear. You're no drab wallflower. Besides, my own presence here is well known; I made no secret I was coming here, and they'd know where to reach me-"
"Will you--be able to?"
He knew what she meant.
"I have enough for now. And I can get in touch with Jardine, if need should arise."
She raised her hand and snapped her fingers close before her face. "Very well, we'll go," she said gaily. "We'll be on our way before the sun goes down. Where shall it be? You name it."
He pocketed one hand, spread the other palm up. "How about one of the northern cities? They're large, they can swallow us whole, we'll never be noticed. Baltimore, Philadelphia, even New York--"
He saw her chew the corner of her underlip in sudden distaste. "Not the North," she said, with a distant look in her eyes. "It's cold and gray and ugly, and it snows--"